September 2.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
The value of land
If the Aborigines are to survive...the 'essential requisite' was land.
[Duncan McNab arrived in] Australia in 1867, working as a priest in Portland for four years...Although appropriately labelled a 'maverick' [1] it is perhaps too fanciful to argue that McNab's zeal to assist downtrodden Aborigines stemmed from his persecuted Scottish Catholic background. Although there have been some exceptional individuals in Australia who sympathised with Aborigines after having themselves been part of an oppressed minority, the generalisation does not hold true. Emancipated Irish convicts were no less brutal to Tasmanian Aborigines than anyone else. The oppressed, near-refugee Scottish Presbyterians in Victoria's Gippsland treated Aborigines just as they themselves had been treated. [2]
Refused entry into the Benedictine monastery at New Norcia, McNab obtained an appointment to the Aborigines Protection Board of Queensland, working initially on Bribie Island in Moreton Bay. He proved to be an indefatigable supporter of Aboriginal land rights. If the Aborigines are to survive, he wrote to a Queensland government official, the 'essential requisite' was land. They had 'the first and best right to it' because it was 'their own country which they had always occupied and used and never renounced or alienated'. [3] He found, however, that those in authority were not particularly interested in the survival of the Aborigines. His plans were thwarted by an uninterested government and antagonistic white landowners. [4]
Stockton, 1988: 201.
See Watson, 1984.
D. McNab to Minister of Lands, 2 September 1876. QLA V&P, 3, 1876, p.167.
Reynolds, 1987:57.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp. 434, 455 n.190, n.191, n.192, n.193.
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A contemporary Indigenous voice:
'Land gives you the essence of who you are. It relates you to the country, to the other people who were born and bred there. It is like a great mosaic or jigsaw puzzle, various parts contributing to an intelligible whole. Dreaming tracks and sacred sights are part of the law and part of day-to-day living. The spirit you have is related to that and relates back to the land.'
Acknowledgment: Pat Dodson, Age, 3 November 1987, cited in The Macquarie Dictionary of Australian Quotations, p. 5.
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Reflection on the term ‘frontier war’
The concept of frontier wars reflects an attempt to give a name to the 'constant sort of war' on the expanding edge of European settlement. While contemporaries commonly used the terms 'native wars' and 'black wars' for the long period of warfare across Australia, the 'frontier wars' is a more palatable description that offered a way to understand the shifting locations of the warfare and to recognise sporadic conflict as war. However, the 'frontier' is always the edge of the expanding colonial centre rather than warfare conducted inside Aboriginal lands. The term also fails to highlight guerrilla and other forms of resistance that occurred well behind the frontier...Ultimately it is a label created by the pens of historians, not by the descendants of those whose lands were radically transformed forever by the conflict.
Acknowledgment: Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars – Conflict in the early colony 1788-1817, pp. 271-72.
Homeland Wars
During one of our interviews…Uncle Bill Allen Junior asked me, Why do you call it the Frontier Wars? Why not the Homeland Wars? It was a war to defend our homelands’. The idea of wars conducted at the edge of an expanding ‘infant empire’ certainly privileges the perspective of the coloniser.
Acknowledgment: Stephen Gapps, GUDYARRA: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance - The Bathurst War, 1822-1824, NewSouth Publishing, 2021, p.216.